


Smile

by Miyamashi (MorganEAshton)



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: Everything I write is a giant psychological character study, Gen, Growing Up, It hurts from just writing this, Ow my face, Puppets, Robots, Slight DirkJake if you really squint, Species confusion (sorta), Wtf do I tag this?, dirk's pov, second-person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-12
Updated: 2012-09-12
Packaged: 2017-11-14 02:18:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/510263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MorganEAshton/pseuds/Miyamashi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You used to smile all the time.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>You didn't do it because you were happy.  It was just the only thing you knew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Smile

**Author's Note:**

> So, I was gonna write porn, but this happened instead.
> 
> This idea came to me very suddenly. It's not really my headcanon, but I could see it as a possibility. It has no relation to "In Their Minds; In Their Hearts" (in fact, it sort of contradicts it), and probably will not have any relation to any other fic I ever write. However, the mental image of it was too strong to resist putting down in words, and I began writing it immediately.
> 
> I hope you enjoy, or at the very least find the idea interesting. <3

You used to smile all the time.

Your eyes were wide and bright orange, your mouth arranged in an impressively wide, toothy grin.

Smiling did not mean you were happy. Smiling was just what you did. You smiled when you were sad, lonely, or angry. You smiled when you were scared or confused. You smiled when you were tired, or hungry, or sick.

You smiled until your face hurt, and then you smiled some more.

After all, Cal wouldn't steer you wrong, would he? This was the way it was supposed to be.

Sometimes when he wasn't looking, you would stop. You would let your dry eyes close, and squeeze them until they watered. You would pop your jaw as quietly as you could, and move your lips around until they felt a little less sore. 

You saw yourself in the mirror once like that. Your eyes had watered to the point of tears, and your lips were just barely pursed. 

It looked so unnatural. 

What if Cal saw? Would it offend him? Would it make him want to turn you away? You wiped your cheeks. You opened your eyes as far as they would open. You tried to show all your teeth at once.

You hated sleeping. When you would begin to drift, you would feel the tense muscles in your face relax, and you would panic. Cal never closed his eyes. Cal never stopped smiling. Cal never needed to sleep, so why should you?

It tugged at the back of your mind: You are not like Cal. 

No. 

You ARE like him. He is your DAD and you are a PUPPET and you have to keep SMILING, and you...

You would prove it.

You sat down by him. You smiled at him and he smiled back, encouragingly. You let yourself slump into the chair. You let your arms relax.

Maybe if you did this, if you stayed perfectly still and awake, he'd get up and move you like you did him. Maybe if you stayed awake, you'd pass the rite, and he'd teach you how to be a better puppet.

You fell asleep quickly the first few times--an unfortunate side-effect to letting your body relax so fully. After an unpleasant incident of falling out of your chair and hitting your head on the counter, you moved to the bed.

It got easier every time. You stayed awake longer and longer with each attempt. You found it hurt to stay still and you had to move around, but that was okay, because it helped keep you awake. 

One day, two days, three... 

The strange dreams you'd often had of the purple place got more frequent, until they happened every time you had to give up and fall asleep. The longer you stayed awake, the more they started to bleed into your waking life, too. You started staying awake so much that you weren't quite sure anymore what was real and what was a dream.

Eventually, you not only no longer needed to sleep, but there were two of you, awake and smiling. Energy flowed back and forth between you in a tangible pulse that reminded you of the waves and ensured that you never tired. 

You knew it. You just knew it! And there was Cal, with you in both worlds, the approval evident on his face. You still had to do the moving for the both of you, but that was fine, right?

You learned how to control them both at once. You learned that it was easier to let your purple self stay in his purple room playing with his Cal in purple robes, while your normal self went about his daily routine. You learned that showers--delightful things that had all the comfort of water with none of the salt or fear of sharks and drowning--were the perfect time to let your purple self stare out the window, intently watching the strange moving dots in white and black below, who were too far down to reach.

You learned how to ensure that neither of them ever stopped smiling.

It was perfect. You were the best son a puppet could ever have.

It was great.

Wonderful, really.

Just fantastic...

Just...

...

Oh, God.

Your face hurt so much. Your eyes burned and your cheeks ached, and your teeth always got dry and stuck to your lips, and you had to drink so. much. soda, because you couldn't produce enough saliva on your own to offset always having your mouth open like that. Now, you didn't even have sleep to offset it. Now you had two bodies in which to feel it, and that only made it twice as bad.

Your eyes had gone wild somewhere in there. You couldn't make them look happy anymore, even as your mouth kept grinning. You covered every reflective surface in the house, because seeing it scared you more than anything ever had.

When you started noticing differences between Cal and yourself, you didn't deny them like you used to.

You weren't sure you wanted to be a puppet anymore.

Cal not only didn't sleep. He didn't move, he didn't eat, he didn't drink, he didn't have to go potty. Your arms didn't bend the way his did. When he got hurt, he fluffed up; When you got hurt, you leaked red that got all over everything and didn't ever seem to wash out. You had to sew it up just the same, but it really was a lot more painful than he ever let on. 

Cal never really let much on at all, did he? His movements, his voice: Those were you. 

When it got too much and you started crying one day--big, nasty, uncontrollable sobs that broke your grin more the longer they went on--you looked up and Cal wasn't angry. He was still smiling. It was such a relief, that you only wept harder. 

Cal still loved you. Cal would always love you.

You stopped smiling altogether, but you were the happiest you'd ever been.

One day, you found a collection of videos of a man. You weren't sure what it was at first. What was this strange, flat puppet in front of you? He was definitely not a reflection, but he never seemed to smile, either. His eyes were round in a different way than Cal's were: Big and black and shiny. 

Despite this, he looked familiar. His arms were like yours with the same single joint, his hands with the same number of fingers. His mouth moved all sorts of ways, not just straight up and down. He said his name was Dave, and he spoke directly to you. He called you his little bro.

All those words you'd learned from the little machines seemed much more useful now. Dave taught you things, and in the last video he introduced you to the internet. 

You learned so much. You learned that you were called a human, and that Dave was one, too. You learned that his eyes weren't eyes at all, but instead contraptions called sunglasses, or shades. You realized that Dave had left you a pair, too, and you tried them on. They weren't round like Dave's were, but wide and pointed. They were huge on your face, but you loved how they looked on you anyway. You learned there was a word called "cool" that described Dave and his shades and yours.

You told Cal everything. He listened with infinite patience, looking proud. It was okay that he was a puppet and you were a human, you reassured him. You didn't mind. He was still the best dad a kid could have. 

It wasn't long before you wanted to meet Dave. Where was he? Where were all the other humans like you? You spent a lot of time staring out the window, eyes searching over the endless ocean for anyone out there.

You learned about robots. You disassembled the machines that had kept you alive when you were too small to take care of yourself, and turned them into metal men. Their faces were impassive like yours, eyes shiny and blank like your shades. They weren't quite puppets and they weren't quite human, but somewhere in between. You liked them very much. They felt like friends. 

The robots fueled the interests you started picking up, like rapping and fighting. They spoke back to you like Cal never could. They bled oil when you hurt them--as hard to wash out as real blood--but you didn't have to sew them up. Instead you got to tinker, make them better and more alive each time you replaced a broken part.

It helped for a time.

That time ran out.

You wanted another human being. You wanted someone who slept and breathed and ate and went potty. You wanted someone who you could share those experiences with. You wanted someone who could feel the salty wet of the ocean, who got hot in the summer and cold in winter. You wanted someone who could also understand what it meant to feel pain.

You wanted someone who could smile like your robots couldn't. You wanted someone who could smile because they were happy, not because they had to, like Cal.

You put off looking on the internet to find out where the other people had gone. Something in you knew you didn't want to know the answer, but when you finally got the courage to type an inquiry into the search bar, something activated, and a video of Dave took over your screen.

He told you everything.

Something in you broke that day, and you wished you'd never looked. You wished you could be a puppet or a robot, because the pain inside was far worse than the pain that made the red spill from your veins.

You didn't cry. The older you'd gotten, the more you'd forgotten how. You just numbly scooped Cal into your arms (Was he getting smaller as time went on, or were you getting bigger? Weren't you just almost the same size?), curled up in bed, and slept.

You could never quite sleep completely. If the normal you slept, the purple you couldn't. If the purple you slept, the normal you woke up. You just wanted to shut down for a bit, turn yourself off. Was that too much to ask?

One day, you looked out the purple-self's window, and saw something floating in the distance. You squinted to see. It looked like a puppet, being pulled through the sky on invisible strings. You wanted to get closer. 

It took you a moment to catch on that your feet had long left the ground. You may not have realized, had you not already gotten halfway out the window.

It wasn't a puppet. It was a person.

The breath seemed to be knocked from your lungs. The stranger kept floating, higher and higher towards the sky. You went to follow, but the farther you got from the purple planet, the more obvious it was that there was something in the sky that you didn't like at all.

You wanted Cal. You really, really wanted Cal. You wanted Sawtooth or Squarewave. You wanted this other person to stop and turn around. 

You tried to stop the stranger, to no avail. 

You couldn't keep following. You were losing sight of the purple planet, and the things in the sky were just getting clearer, and louder, and more threatening. 

Then the stranger was gone, into the darkness. You flew back into your room and clutched at Cal for dear life.

When your normal self woke up, there was a spark of hope: If there was another person on the purple planet, then there was probably another person here, too. 

Like you.

Her name was Roxy, and she became your first living friend.

You sent each other pictures, to make sure you were both truly human. You clicked into hers hesitantly, because you didn't want to get hurt again if she was lying, but when the file opened, the stranger from the purple planet was there. She was holding a glass of something, one eye closed in what you knew from your studies was called a wink. She seemed to be smiling, though it was strange and small and didn't show any teeth. 

She told you that it was weird how your expression was so blank. You told her it was weird that hers wasn't. She typed a laugh, but you hadn't been kidding. You didn't want her to leave, though, so you made up a story using a word you'd learned called irony. Irony was the unexpected, and she had expected you to be more expressive. You said it was cool to be ironic, and your shades were cool, and you were cool too, like your bro. She seemed impressed.

Your second friend said she was an alien. That scared you a bit, since you knew it was aliens who had killed all the people who weren't you or Roxy. She assured you not all aliens were mean, and it took a while, but you eventually believed her. She wouldn't tell you her name or send you a picture, but she was a fantastic source of information. She told you that the purple planet was called Derse. She told you that you were a hero, and that someday you'd play a game. She told you that if you played, you might be able to meet other people face-to-face, and maybe bring Dave back from the dead.

It gave you something to live for. Suddenly nothing else mattered--none of the pain, none of the loneliness. You would play and you would play to win. You would meet Roxy for real. You would meet Dave.

Your alien friend sent both you and Roxy updates to Pesterchum. It came with the names of two new friends pre-embedded into the programming. She said they were from the past, from before everyone had died, but that you would be able to speak to them just like you spoke to Roxy. They would play the game with you. The program did not let you speak to others in their timeline, but that didn't matter, not when you could meet two others like yourself.

One day you met a girl named Jane, and she sent you a picture of herself. 

Her eyes were big and blue like Cal's, but lighter. You liked that. However, her smile never seemed to quite reach them. From your endless scrutiny of the pictures of the dead people on the internet, you figured out you could describe it as shy, or even a little scared. You could see her front teeth, but that didn't make it a real smile. It reminded you of a time you would have rather forgotten, when you kept smiling through the pain, and you ached for her.

One day you met a boy named Jake, and he sent you a picture of himself. 

In it, his eyes were wide and bright green behind his glasses, his mouth arranged in an impressively wide, toothy grin. 

It felt like home.

**Author's Note:**

> This didn't go through nearly as much editing as my last fic, and it probably shows. Oh well. I wasn't going for perfect this time, just having fun. Didn't expect it to be nearly this long, though.
> 
> Thank you for reading! <3 and digital hugs.


End file.
